About the Lecture Series:
The Dr. Jean Shim Yun Lecture Series spotlights scholarly research focused on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Each year, the Series invites groundbreaking academics and artists to campus to enrich conversations of race, ethnicity, and identity, particularly in context of the immigrant experience.
About the Speaker:
As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.
In Mott Street, Ava Chin looks closely at her Chinese American family’s story and confronts the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the impact that it had on her family generations ago.